The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

Unlike Frances and Mr. Bilderbach, whose deeply meaningful student-teacher relationship is the product of many years, this story’s protagonists exemplify a failed kind of mentorship. The man tries to explain love to the paper boy in many different ways, but the paper boy does not have the experience to understand the man. The man’s figurative language, which he hopes makes his point clear to the child, is unsuccessful in getting his meaning across. For instance, he uses a simile of factory work to explain how the woman he loved affected him: “There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul. I run these little pieces of myself through her and I come out complete” (147). In the comparison, the woman is a skilled craftsman, making a working whole out of the man’s “loose” pieces of self. However, nothing that he says connects with the boy’s lived experience: The boy has not worked in a factory, he is not old enough to have experienced love, and he has never had to process “beautiful feelings.” The man’s imagery of the complex emotions he feels about the woman is thus lost on his listener.

Like “A Domestic Dilemma,” “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud” features a young child making sense of the world of adults. The paper boy does his best to absorb the strange man’s views of love, but he struggles to follow the man’s ideas: “The boy did not know what to think of the man, and his child’s face was uncertain with mingled curiosity and doubt. He was new on the paper route; it was still strange to him to be out in the town in the black, queer early morning” (147). Unlike Martin, whose understanding of his son Andy is shown to be deep and empathetic, the man views the boy as a blank sounding board. As a result, the paper boy cannot connect with the man; his mind is full of his own concerns, such as the new paper route and the unfamiliar “early morning” experience of the town. The boy’s naiveté is reflected in his reactions to the idea of romantic love and to his unaccustomed route: He is “curious” but also “doubtful” about the right way to respond. Like in many of the other stories, the setting mirrors the emotional tenor of the scene. Just like the boy’s conversation with the man, the town in the early morning is “strange.”

In the stories, the motif of memories often connects to the theme of The Mysteries of Love and Affection. In “The Sojourner,” Elizabeth’s music brings up memories of love for John Ferris, forcing him to reconsider his life. In “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud,” the man also emphasizes the large role of memory in anchoring the emotion of love: “But a sudden piece of glass on a sidewalk. Or a nickel tune in a music box. A shadow on a wall at night. And I would remember. It might happen in a street and I would cry or bang my head against a lamppost” (148). The most mundane objects and situations remind the man of the wife who left him, causing a visceral emotional reaction. His connection to this woman was so strong that everything evokes memories of her. Rather than finding a logical relationship between these objects and his love, he decides to commit to the mysterious nature of the connection by trying to control his experience of love and approach it like a science.